Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

  They started happening all the time, these private moments of road rage. A sign warned of a lane closing ahead. Two lanes must merge into one. The cars from each lane were meant to take turns. The zipper merge—they showed you movies about it in driver’s ed. And yet, a dude (invariably—almost certainly—a man) decided to zip up the shoulder and cut the line. He drove until he passed all the cars and then nosed into the merge. She even yelled through her window, “Zipper merge, you line-cutting piece of shit!” Another time: “You must be so important, so much more important than everyone else!” These men—once she had one try to merge in front of her after flagrant line cutting. He wouldn’t even make eye contact. He just presumed she would be bullied into letting him in. “No fucking way,” she said, keeping the nose of her car right on the back bumper of the car in front of her. “No way do you get in front of me after you cheated!” Civilization depended on it, her resistance to these cutters.

  Then one snowy, shitty January day, she truly crossed a line. She went to park her car in a full lot and she saw another car (a truck, actually, a giant, gleaming truck) parked on the line between two spaces. This filled her with a profound and pathetic rage. It wasn’t a mistake, this person had deliberately parked on top of a line and took up two spaces. Probably so that no one would ding his paint job. So no one would get their car doors anywhere near his. So hey, fuck everyone else. She slowed her car, stared in astonishment at the arrogance. Or maybe he just hadn’t bothered to check the lines, which was also selfish and entitled. And now others must drive around and around, looking for a space. She should have swallowed her rage, let it go. That was what normal people did. Normal, functional people. Instead, she stopped her car. She got out and moved toward his truck. She had her key in her hand. She thought, You asshole, you awful asshole, and she held the key out—just an inch or two by her hip as she walked the length of his truck. She allowed—she pressed—the key into the side of the inappropriately parked vehicle. She felt it dig in and scrape as she walked. At the time she was unconcerned that this was serious vandalism, an actual crime. Instead, she felt a rush of pleasure and a wonderful relief. The relief of justice finally done. She thought, I am a parking vigilante! And she laughed out loud. She didn’t even look around to see if she’d been seen. She imagined him discovering the scratch, imagined his impotent anger. For a moment, it delighted her; it filled her with light.

  But. What if he was walking toward his truck right now? A person with a truck like this could shoot her; keying was the kind of thing people got beat up for. She rushed to get back into her car. He’s lucky I didn’t ram him, she thought. And she threw the car into gear and hurried off to park far, far away. She was glad, but now she was no longer satisfied. She was angry still. More angry. Her action multiplied and squared her rage, which made no sense, how no satisfaction lasted. She had parked, it was over, whatever it was. She knew she had no right to be angry, no reason. But this was the time for this feeling of no reason. Rage was in the air, stupid, impulsive. The age of no-reason.

  Boundaries were dissolving. She could do things not for the sake of mere transgression or aggression, but because of a certain porosity, a flimsy sense of her self-limits, maybe. For example, if there was a line for the women’s room (always), why not just use the men’s room? She felt impulse, and then the barest repression of impulse.

  The keying, though, that was the line, a clear indicator. She confessed that to no one—not even her mother, her defender. Sam could not behave any longer. You put it all in motion, and then you watched as your life fell apart.

  12

  “I need to postpone your visit.” Her mother called while Matt was getting dressed. Sam put her finger to her mouth to shush him, but she planned to tell her mother that she was “seeing” Matt again when she visited her. (She knew her mother would approve, which both irritated and pleased Sam.)

  “Postpone again? I haven’t seen you in so long. Why?”

  “I just have some appointments I needed to book, and this week doesn’t work any longer.”

  Sam said nothing. Lily kept putting her off. “Okay, of course. I’ll come next weekend instead.”

  “Ally might come next weekend.”

  “Really?” Sam’s voice caught.

  “I know it’s hard. She’s driving herself.”

  “It’s good, I want her to see you.”

  “I love you, sweetheart. Please don’t worry.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Let’s talk after I see Ally.”

  They hung up.

  “Is Lily okay?” Matt asked. He was very fond of Sam’s mother, and she of him. And then, before she could respond, Sam started to cry. “Oh no, Sam.”

  “She’s fine,” Sam finally said, but that was a lie. Lily was not fine. “I just miss her.” Matt sat next to her and rubbed her back.

  “I know,” he said. “I knew it.”

  Matt thought he had figured it all out, figured her out. But his sympathy just felt like another demand on her.

  “You should go,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Matt’s first guess had been wrong. The catalyst for leaving him wasn’t the election. Honestly, the world had felt broken and unjust her entire life. This was just a very crude example. An appalling and crude example. It was not the election. It wasn’t even the house, she realized. But she had to admit that Matt’s last guess was closer. Of all the reasons, of all the things making her lose her mind, if it were any one thing, it had to be Lily, her mother.

  13

  On a clear cold day back in February, she had gone for an overnight visit with Lily. Her mother lived by herself near a rural hamlet in the Mohawk Valley, one hour and forty-five minutes east of Syracuse. Ten years ago, after Sam’s father had died, Lily sold their apartment in the city and bought this pretty little house in the country.

  Sam loved her mother’s place. It was an eccentric, rustic hippie modernist dwelling built in the seventies by a talented carpenter weirdo. It was small, one story, made of glass and reclaimed wood, angled into a hill with a view of the farm-quilted valley. It had a wall of double-paned windows facing south for passive solar heat, and the kitchen and living area were one open room. The centerpiece was a large enamel wood-burning stove. It truly was cozy, with the winter miracle of light and warmth, probably because of the radiant heat under the concrete, rug-covered floors. Her mother lived modestly, but the rugs were extravagant. Other than the rugs, there were bookshelves on the non-windowed walls, and a painting by one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends. (Her mother was one of those women whose old boyfriends continued to love for their entire lives.) The couch was an old, heavy sectional. The kitchen was functional, with a big gas stove and a large vintage fruitwood table, which doubled as a desk. It was the perfect house to live in on your own. Sam felt its serenity, how you would wake up and feel okay there. In the summer, the house was surrounded by a garden that Lily tended with devotion. She had raised beds for vegetables; she had flowers that bloomed in succession all season long. She was no hermit, though. She saw friends in town; she drove a small SUV. She had a television, a nearby library, and a strong internet connection. She was alone, but not lonely. (“Besides, I have Raisin for company.” Raisin was her inexplicably named nine-year-old German shepherd, a serious dog with a propensity for thoughtfully resting his chin on your knee. Sam admitted that Raisin was adorable and hypercompanionable, like an advertisement for dog love. He even cocked his head and listened when her mother spoke.) It was exactly what Lily wanted. And really, she seemed happier than she had in the city, although Sam wished she were closer to Syracuse.

  Every month or so, Sam came to visit and stayed overnight. The house notably had no guest room (draw your own conclusions), but one part of the sectional couch converted to a comfortable bed. When she used to visit with Ally, they would camp out on the sectional and have a slumber party
. When Ally was very young and her mother still lived in the city, they would all climb into bed with Lily. The three of them, whispering in the dark, giggling. Sam would get very goofy in these moments. Spending time with her mother and her daughter. Sometimes she would feel so happy she would do funny dances for them, perform scenes from movies, do pratfalls. Sam had a bad voice, Sam was a bad dancer, but she liked being foolish. She had an inner clown. She often broke into made-up songs for her daughter’s amusement. And a few adults: her mother, and Matt when he was with Ally. This was Sam’s secret weapon, goofiness, which was a form of trust, really. She remembered how it felt to get Ally to exclaim, “You are so silly, Mama!” All of them laughing.

  14

  One of the last nights they spent together in her parents’ city apartment, Ally, Lily, and Sam were all sleeping in her mother’s king bed. This made six-year-old Ally giddy rather than sleepy. They were “reading,” but Sam and Ally kept whispering, and then Ally would ask a ridiculous question (“Grandma, why do cats always land on their feet?”) and Lily would barely look up from her book, shaking her head in exaggerated exasperation, which made Sam and Ally erupt into volcanic laughter. Finally they all quieted down. Sam got up to go to the bathroom, and on the way back she began to reenact a commercial that had popped into her head from her childhood. It was for bubble bath.

  Apropos of nothing, she sang the stupid, stupid jingle, burned into her childhood brain forever:

  “I can bring home the bacon,” Sam sang, vamping around the bedroom with an imaginary briefcase, which she threw.

  “Fry it up in a pan,” she sang, sexily frying something with one hand, the other on a jutty hip.

  Lily was laughing, and this made Ally hysterical.

  “And never, never, never let you forget that you’re a man, cause I’m a woooo-man, Enjoli.”

  Then Sam stopped, laughing, and fell on the bed, breathless.

  “What on earth made you think of that?” Lily said.

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Yes, oh yes,” her mother said.

  “What an effed-up commercial. Appealing to the modern working woman.”

  “What was it?” Ally said. So Sam found the commercial on YouTube, and they watched it. It was exactly as she remembered, as silly as she remembered.

  It was the greatest thing, being with them in the bed, making them both laugh. She remembered the moment so well, and part of what made it memorable was how easy it was. A natural ease and enjoyment they all had with one another. At the time, the pleasure of their togetherness, their love, felt endless. She longed to go back to that moment, to relive it but, really, to stay in it forever.

  Now everything rushed forward so fast she could hardly keep up. She didn’t want what lay ahead, the future, for the first time in her life. She wanted that moment, and all the ordinary moments before and after it. She could conjure how the days surrounding that sleepover went, the simple routine of that time in their lives. All of it felt better than now.

  15

  It was in the weeks preceding her February visit that Lily had begun her odd distance toward Sam, putting her off when Sam tried to make a plan. Her mother used to visit them too—to see one of Ally’s concerts or soccer games. And holidays, of course. But Lily had a bad knee, and the long drive was becoming too much for her. For the previous six months, Sam had come to her. But the last two times Sam had said she wanted to come, her mother had some excuse. Usually a doctor’s appointment.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, routine, at a certain age there is a routine of tests and visits.”

  Then Lily couldn’t have a visit because she had her book group. Or she had her local resistance meeting, which was pretty much the same group as the book club. Also, Lily was too tired for a visit right now.

  “You would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would. I’m just tired. Please don’t worry.”

  Sam believed that if she brought up her fears to people, spoke them aloud, the fears would lose their valence, their hold over her. Or maybe it was more selfish than that. She wanted her mother to reassure her, tell her everything would be fine, when of course nothing would be fine and there was no reassurance to be had. Her beautiful mother was almost eighty.

  Finally, Lily had agreed to a visit. Sam arrived in the late afternoon. She took a hot bath in her mother’s extra-large tub while her mother made them a thick soup with vegetables from her garden she had frozen from the summer and some “fantastic sausages” she’d gotten from the farmers’ market. Sam smelled the garlic and spices, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the porcelain. She wished she could have brought Ally, but Ally had so much schoolwork. Next time.

  They ate dinner, and Sam caught Lily up on all things Ally. Sam also told her amusing, slightly mean stories about people who visited Clara Loomis House and more than slightly mean descriptions of the women in the local resistance meeting Sam had attended. They rehashed takes on the inauguration, the Women’s March, stuff they had already discussed by phone. They were both tired and went to bed early. The morning was always the time for them to really talk, the time they relaxed. Maybe it was because all the chatter and updates had been burned through the night before. Or maybe it was something about sleeping in the same house that made Sam relax like nothing else.

  Sam woke to the smell of the coffee her mother had already made. She gazed sleepily at her mother sitting at the table and taking a sip from her mug. Beyond her mother was the valley and the horizon. Clouds hung low, horizontal and strewn, the dawn pinching their edges pink and gold.

  Lily was not looking at the view or at Sam. She was writing in a notebook. She had written two books: one of personal essays and one novel. She claimed to be working on a third book, a collection of stories, but it had been fifteen years since her last book, so who knew? Her mother looked highly focused, and Sam hesitated to interrupt her. Sam closed her eyes and huddled in the warmth of the blanket. The blanket smelled like her mother’s lavender laundry soap. Raisin slept at Sam’s feet.

  Sam couldn’t fall back asleep, but she stayed quiet and continued to watch her mother. Lily looked frail, her face troubled. But she was thinking and writing. After a few minutes of this, she looked over at Sam and smiled.

  “Good morning! Did I wake you, sweetheart?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I get up super early these days.” She sat up on the couch, pulled on the ugly but warm Acorn slipper socks and the thick flannel robe her mother kept at her house just for her. She went over to the wood-burning stove and warmed her hands. Her mother handed her a cup of strong black coffee. It was the best moment of the day, of any day. The coffee, the warmth and smell of the stove, the tending from Lily. Sam tried not to taint her pleasure with morbid thoughts, but they were always at the edge of her mind these days. It was as if she had a low drumming under her at all times. It supplied an elegiac backbeat to nearly every joy. Was this what it meant to get older? That the little time left would never be carefree? Would morbidity increase with each year?

  (Once she had asked her mother about how she conceived of the future now that she was in her late seventies.

  “You mean how do I think about the future when I probably don’t have much of one?”

  “No,” Sam said, but that was what she meant.

  “Honestly, I don’t think about it,” Lily had said.

  Sam had hoped for some wisdom, but maybe that was wisdom.)

  Her mother’s illness, whatever disease or malady it was that she withheld from Sam, did not seem real until later, after Sam had left her mother and was driving home. Sometimes, in the middle of discussions, Sam found a fleeting refuge. It was out of the rush to fill the air with language, to ask and to speak and to listen. It was not just that the words could get Sam what she wanted if she kept using them. She believed that if she asked the
right question, there was hope for connection or a transaction of some kind. What is wrong? Followed by the answer, even the shitty dodge of “I don’t want to talk about it” was still something, a point made and understood between them. They were alive and together in the talk; it buzzed the air and it was the primary messy stuff of life. And it would supply language to memory, give it an extra reality shaped and defined by words.

  But in the car, during the long drive home on the tedious interstate, even if she listened to the radio or a podcast, and especially if she listened to music, Sam found the space for her thoughts beyond her own noise. It wasn’t that she needed the world to be silent; it was that she needed her own silence. The quiet was a matter of her not speaking and grabbing at her mother with questions and statements and pleadings. When Sam was not listening or speaking, she could think. Not ruminate—that belonged to the middle of the night, full of her masticated hysterics. This thinking was something soberer and further-reaching, often sparked not by a reflection of her own fears, but by being in the world and not trying to get or do anything except a mundane task, like driving across the state.

  She was listening to a health podcast she subscribed to. Someone talking about genes. Epigenetics, which seemed to mean how you can shape gene expression, a sort of self-help dressed up as “hacking your genetics” so you too can avoid these diseases. And “snips,” whatever defect that was, related to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, diabetes. As if taking choline and getting deep sleep would overcome your genetic destiny. The discussion turned to how the interviewee, a PhD of some kind who also deadlifted three times her body weight in the gym, suggested one should grow broccoli sprouts so one could consume high-potency sulforaphane, which was going to shut off some flawed gene signal. What a thing to think: your body was just in need of some tweak, some little actionable intervention, and it would be perfect, whole, untainted with error or flaw. All such desire was, of course, about erasing our destiny, fixing the fatal flaw contained in the code, escaping the glitch that would lead to our demise. Overwriting your code. Reprogramming. But maybe the code was perfect, built (if not designed) to destruct in its own unique and unforeseen way, as much in our control as Atropos cutting your mortal thread with her scissors, no matter how many sprouts and pure encapsulated supplements you left as offerings at her feet.